We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Caroline Gray a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Caroline, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?
I have a number of projects. Two are represented in my ongoing show, Undercurrents, which focuses on my underwater series of dancers together with some California landscapes. The underwater series has been a big project for me, big in the complexity of organisation, meaningful because of the wonderful and novel sense of grace that resulted. I am fascinated by water (I swim a lot) buy its movement and the endless complexity of light and reflections, and equally by dance and the fluidity of movement in the human body. Bringing these together in a project to capture the grace of dance underwater combined with elegantly swirling costumes while the water added layers of reflections and a certain otherworldliness to the dancers’ movements…well what could be more exciting? Bringing it all together was another matter! So the backstory. I took an underwater class some years ago to learn the basics from a great teacher. I then pursued this with a couple of friends. We hired a camera housing, weights, and found some willing dancers and their costume designer to participate in the project. One friend had a swimming pool which we lined to get the effects we wanted. For the shoot, I weighed myself down.. and slid from the shallow to the middle…to meet the dancers as they dived in the deep . For a few seconds of miraculous grace. All this without breathing equipment — partly with an eye to its spontaneity and a certain chanciness that I like. I find art such a mixture of preparation and accident. Anyway here it was all about the timing, about dancer and photographer. reaching the same point together. These underwater captures are really about my fascination with the movement of dance, and the curious blend and resolution between the fluid movement of dance and the instantaneous capture of the photograph. The still point of the turning world.
Caroline, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I was always holding a camera, but then shifted seriously to digital and took a series of classes. This launched me and I found myself doing real-estate and landscape garden work – even a bit of portrait, food, and magazine photography – before focusing on my own projects. I am also a painter (mainly water color and acrylic) and this has fed into my photography, in terms of composition, color palette and especially light. The painterly quality becomes very noticeable in some of my photographic work. One major source of inspiration is the variety of Californian landscape and I love to be able to produce work that be presented in large sizes whose grandeur can dominate a room as well as in smaller versions that come across as jewels. Such contrasts occur also within landscapes, the full lively humanity present on the beach contrasting with the tiny human figures almost lost in the flowing dunes of Death Valley landscapes. My style of work is very much ‘in the moment’; I work fast, aiming for a zen quality – I do very little by way of post production and enhancement although aware of its possibilities. But I would say almost all the work is in the preparation, in the training of the individual eye over years of practice, of trial and critique: having found one’s ‘voice’, one is free to see the sudden joy in front of one. Because the training is embedded it encourages a certain humility and openness faced with the subjects. I think of my photographs ultimately as invitations to the viewer to join in and share a visual conversation. I am most proud to sharing my joy and sense of vitality with others, whether in my current solo show, other shows in photography and paintings, magazine articles, and on instagram.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
I think doing what one really loves makes one fully alive. As a photographer I like to get up early and hit the California beach to capture the sunrise or sunset, maybe on Santa Monica or Malibu Beach, and see the surfers capturing the first or last rays of light as they hit the waves. It is immensely satisfying to be a part of a special moment with others… a pelican might fly by as the sun comes up and the moon goes down and all problems of the world disappear: all seems for a moment right. It is hard to explain how it feels to be there, only my photos express that for me. The same sense of being totally present happens when my paintbrush touches the paper.. and the first mark is made. It is this sense of stepping out from the mundane that inspires me, and the way I see my photos or paintings as invitations to others to step with me — just for that moment, a moment where we are gathered.
Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?
Like any area of human life, some parts and some approaches are more difficult and are ones most of us struggle to understand. Some art too is like this, and also the way an artist develops over time, the rationale for this, can be obscure and hard to discern. But equally some art is inviting rather than challenging. This is more my own aim. Confidence is always a human issue –“do I really understand?” “maybe it’s not for me?”. I want my audience to feel a degree of wonder that is not threatening but welcoming, and the work of art a happy meeting place for us both. Behind this thought is a disbelief that anyone is “noncreative”; to look at the object is already actively to engage, a completing of the artist’s journey, a making of it into a human conversation, and an enlargement of both object and artist, in the way that good relationships make each partner bigger than on their own, and helps develop the journey of all.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://carolinegrayarts.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/carolinegrayphotography/?hl=en
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/caroline.gray.35/https://www.facebook.com/CarolineGrayPhotography/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caroline-gray-a9333316/
- Other: https://www.flickr.com/photos/caroline_gray/